Synthesis was, and still is, the hard part. It was already easy to find public information on seriously nasty nerve agents.
For some intuition on the difficulty in synthesis, note that explosive chemistry and synthesis is comparatively trivial, yet there are relatively few terror attacks that go beyond commercial-off-the-shelf compounds and almost none that do it well.
Personally, I think this model would be a boon for public safety because contract synthesis operations could use it to screen incoming requests for "nerve gas but changed up a bit." Basic chemical intuition probably already gets them far in this regard, but a published model could be standardized and mandated.
Someone else in the thread asked about next steps. Those would be good next steps.
there are relatively few terror attacks that go beyond commercial-off-the-shelf compounds and almost none that do it well
The 2011 Norway attacks, 2002 Bali bombings, 2005 London underground bombings, 2008 Mumbai attacks... There is a long list of deadly terrorist attacks using homemade explosives, I don't think this is something to be dismissed.
There is a long list of deadly terrorist attacks using homemade explosives
But they used well-known and readily available compounds. They don't attempt to use novel ones. It would just make the attack way more difficult to execute.
Comments
Synthesis was, and still is, the hard part. It was already easy to find public information on seriously nasty nerve agents.
For some intuition on the difficulty in synthesis, note that explosive chemistry and synthesis is comparatively trivial, yet there are relatively few terror attacks that go beyond commercial-off-the-shelf compounds and almost none that do it well.
Personally, I think this model would be a boon for public safety because contract synthesis operations could use it to screen incoming requests for "nerve gas but changed up a bit." Basic chemical intuition probably already gets them far in this regard, but a published model could be standardized and mandated.
Someone else in the thread asked about next steps. Those would be good next steps.
The 2011 Norway attacks, 2002 Bali bombings, 2005 London underground bombings, 2008 Mumbai attacks... There is a long list of deadly terrorist attacks using homemade explosives, I don't think this is something to be dismissed.
But they used well-known and readily available compounds. They don't attempt to use novel ones. It would just make the attack way more difficult to execute.
IIRC Germany experienced some rather horrific accidents in their facilities for manufacturing chemical weapons.